photo credit Luis Asín
Miriam Bäckström b. 1967
New Enter Image III, 2016
Jacquard tapestry (cotton, silk, wool, Trevira CS, Lurex and acrylic on Trevira CS warp)
287 x 506 cm
Miriam Bäckström’s series New Enter Image, is a new body of work that negotiates the boundaries of photography, textile and architecture. New Enter Image are large-scale suspended woven tapestries based...
Miriam Bäckström’s series New Enter Image, is a new body of work that negotiates the boundaries of photography, textile and architecture. New Enter Image are large-scale suspended woven tapestries based upon photographs Miriam Bäckström has taken. Created in different sizes and formats, these tapestries redefine the architecture of the space them. The original photographs are extremely high-resolution digital images of various banal manufactured surfaces including textile, plastic and cardboard. They capture the intricate details that only advanced technology is able to register. This information is then translated into digitally woven tapestries, a medium often associated as traditional and tangible: where the resolution of the photographic image ends, the yarns of the textile begin.
In Miriam Bäckström’s previous work, photographs of rooms and interiors reveal themselves to be staged or referred to reality to somehow be artificial. New Enter Image, builds on this work, where fiction and reality merge into one image, one perception.Photography has, since its invention in the 1840s, placed the viewer in front of an image, to occupy the spot where the camera was positioned when the image was taken. Today, the mass and constant flow of images means there are multiple perspectives at play at anyone time. One no longer looks at an image from a singular perspective; but rather inhabits a situation from multiple viewpoints, or as Miriam Bäckström describes it, we are able to enter the image.Artificial reality is characterised by the absence of rules and restrictions that determine its physical counterpart. Today, it could be said that photography is being forced to abandon the tasks it traditionally was born to perform – as a tool to represent and document reality. Photography no longer signals ‘truthful representation of the real’. Instead it refers to itself, imitates itself and often references its own history.
In New Enter Image Miriam Bäckström pushes photographic perception to a point where distinctions between medium and image, material and surface become so paradoxical that they can no longer be upheld. She seeks to push the medium to a point of collapse. As a photographic method she employs imitation and illusion, recognition and distortion. Whilst the works in New Enter Image appear to be two-dimensional objective representations of matter; they render every depicted surface unidentifiable and offer the viewer hypothetical, theoretical and highly speculative scenes.
In Miriam Bäckström’s previous work, photographs of rooms and interiors reveal themselves to be staged or referred to reality to somehow be artificial. New Enter Image, builds on this work, where fiction and reality merge into one image, one perception.Photography has, since its invention in the 1840s, placed the viewer in front of an image, to occupy the spot where the camera was positioned when the image was taken. Today, the mass and constant flow of images means there are multiple perspectives at play at anyone time. One no longer looks at an image from a singular perspective; but rather inhabits a situation from multiple viewpoints, or as Miriam Bäckström describes it, we are able to enter the image.Artificial reality is characterised by the absence of rules and restrictions that determine its physical counterpart. Today, it could be said that photography is being forced to abandon the tasks it traditionally was born to perform – as a tool to represent and document reality. Photography no longer signals ‘truthful representation of the real’. Instead it refers to itself, imitates itself and often references its own history.
In New Enter Image Miriam Bäckström pushes photographic perception to a point where distinctions between medium and image, material and surface become so paradoxical that they can no longer be upheld. She seeks to push the medium to a point of collapse. As a photographic method she employs imitation and illusion, recognition and distortion. Whilst the works in New Enter Image appear to be two-dimensional objective representations of matter; they render every depicted surface unidentifiable and offer the viewer hypothetical, theoretical and highly speculative scenes.